2013/1/4 Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org> > On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 6:38 PM, Kay Schenk <kay.sch...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Here's is the latest/final draft for the proposed new user portal web > site > > home page incorporating News scrolling: > > > > http://www.openoffice.org/test/ > > > > I am invoking "lazy consensus" for this change. If I hear no complaints > by > > Sunday 1750 PDT, I will implement this change. > > > > I can see how this makes it easier to manage the news articles. > Previously we kept the most recent articles on index.html and > "rotated" the older ones off onto an archive page. This was a manual > process, an extra set of steps. With your new SSI mechanism we just > keep all of the news articles in a single SSI file, the are displayed > on the home page and the user can scroll through them. So from the > perspective of the author of the news stories this is a big > improvement. Thanks for looking into this! > > However, from the perspective of the page reader, this has two liabilities: > > 1) Aesthetically, from a design perspective this doesn't work well, > especially that scroll bar. IMHO, it does not look like a > professional page. > > 2) Impact on page load time. As we add more stories to the SSI, > especially stories with images/photos (which I'd like to start doing) > the page size is going to increase. Eventually this becomes a problem > and we're back to manual rotation of the stories to an archive page. > > Since this is the visitors first impression of the project, I wonder > if it is worth exploring further to see if there is a way to address > these issues? As I mentioned before, the ASF home page has a "latest > activity" panel that avoids both of these problems: > > http://www.apache.org/ > > Can we copy what they do? >
Disclaimer: from the technical point of view, I have no idea what I'm talking about so just take the following as an example of what happens when a completely html illiterate starts to think aloud... Suppose we put all news on one page, but organized with a heading, an abstract and then the main article. Question: is it possible to use that page as a sort of database and load only the, say, first five headings with their corresponding abstracts and show them on the lateral panel in the main page? No idea how difficult could be to do that, but once it is set managing the news will be easier and I think this could solve both problems mentioned by Rob. Regards Ricardo > > -Rob > > > Thereafter all "news" items will not be added to the home page directly > or > > to /news/index.html, but to /news/newslist.ssi (this is a text file, not > > html), LIFO order, maintaining the styling you see for other items there. > > > > -- > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > MzK > > > > "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." > > -- Aesop >
